Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to continue always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.

Every generation inherits a vast amount of finished work, and the only cost of using it is the trouble of finding out what it was. Refusing that inheritance does not make you original; it puts you back at the start of a problem solved before you were born. Nothing accumulates if each person begins from nothing. The whole advantage humans have is that the labour carries forward.

Before starting on something hard, spend an hour learning who has already done it and what they concluded. Read the old account rather than a summary of a summary. Originality gets much cheaper once you know where the edge actually is.